This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Thunderbird not downloading attachments from Gmail account

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 3 views
  • Last reply by Matt

Bryan
Bryan
more options

I gave my wife a newer Windows 10 laptop last December. Thunderbird continues to perform well for us. However, although I have set the preferred folder for attachments on the laptop's hard drive, no attachments have been downloaded since the new laptop went into service. Our local "attachments" folder has lots of files, copied over when I did a full laptop-to-laptop copy, but none are newer than last December. I suspect there may be something in either Gmail's or Thunderbird's account settings which governs whether or not email attachments are actually downloaded and saved to the laptop PC, or just accessed from the Google servers. Any thoughts on this would be most welcome. -Bryan

I gave my wife a newer Windows 10 laptop last December. Thunderbird continues to perform well for us. However, although I have set the preferred folder for attachments on the laptop's hard drive, no attachments have been downloaded since the new laptop went into service. Our local "attachments" folder has lots of files, copied over when I did a full laptop-to-laptop copy, but none are newer than last December. I suspect there may be something in either Gmail's or Thunderbird's account settings which governs whether or not email attachments are actually downloaded and saved to the laptop PC, or just accessed from the Google servers. Any thoughts on this would be most welcome. -Bryan

All Replies (2)

Bryan
Bryan Question owner
more options

I should add that I have searched the entire C: drive for files matching the names of some received email attachments, to no avail. And when I open an attachment and investigate its properties, there is no folder location listed, which makes me suspect the file is still on the google server. Of course I can elect to save a given attachment to the local hard drive, but I would like all attachments to download to the PC automatically, as they used to. Cheers, Bryan

Matt
Matt
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
more options

Perhaps you misunderstand the whole attachment thing.

Attachments are not files. They are blocks of mime encoded text in the body of the email and this is how Thunderbird stores them in the original email as mime encoded text. The folder you have set is to be the default when you select the save action in the attachment pane of an email. Nothing more.

If a folder is marked for offline use (the default) then the entire email and any attachments is stored on the local machine in the profile folder. If however you have set Thunderbird to not store emails on the local machine then they will be fetched from the gmail server as you access them. There is a cache that reduces this constant fetching a bit if you go back to the same email over and over. But for speed it is preferable to simply have a copy of everything locally.